The monitoring, diagnosis and treatment of various conditions, disorders and diseases, such as eye conditions, disorders, diseases, etc., typically involve the regular physical intervention by a medical professional, requiring the subject to make an appointment and visit the doctor's or practitioner's offices. On the part of the subject, this involves travel time to the doctor and back, a waiting period and typically a face-to-face discussion with a nurse practitioner or doctor's assistant, followed by a discussion and examination by a doctor. Insofar as the subject is issued with a prescription, he or she then has to proceed to a pharmacy, wait for the prescription to be filled and finally proceed home. Thus, the treatment and monitoring of subjects is a highly time-consuming exercise.
From the practitioner's or provider's perspective, the number of subjects he or she can see is limited by the face-to-face time with each subject to discuss the subject's condition, arrange slip lamps and other scanning devices, examine the subject, update the subject's records and record the tests conducted for compliance and insurance purposes.
Even when subjects are scheduled for follow-up examinations pursuant to the use of certain medications, the practitioner merely has the opportunity to determine whether there is a change in the subject's condition, but still remains unable to verify whether or not the subject has regularly taken the medication and has done so in the correct dose. This equally applies to veterinary doctors. Thus, notwithstanding the time-consuming nature of in-person examinations, the decisions that can be drawn from the analysis remain largely speculative and inconclusive.
Thus, comparisons to prior results of a particular subject, and comparisons to other subjects treated with the same drugs, can only act as an approximation due to the many unknowns. The inaccuracies in the results may be ascribed to both human error and the limitations of current dispensing devices. An additional problem is that subjects may forget to dose or double-dose or cross-dose with other medications. Even when subjects administer medication correctly (or have the medication correctly administered), current technology does not provide a satisfactory way of controlling the amount of medication that is dispensed, nor does it provide a way of ensuring that the medication that is dispensed actually reaches the eye and remains in the eye.
Current approaches fail to provide an accurate way of monitoring the administration of medication and dosages. The present disclosure addresses such shortcomings in addition to others.